Case Study | Google Maps Coordinate

Sutton & East Surrey Water improves productivity and cuts costs with Google Maps Coordinate Customer Sutton & East Surrey Water supplies water to 655,000 consumers in 280,000 properties across 322 miles in the South East of England.

At a Glance What they wanted to do • Implement a system that would simplify working practices and help improve productivity and efficiency What they did • Deployed Google Maps Coordinate on tablets amongst the meter fitting and water maintenance operations What they accomplished • An annual ROI of 500% on using Google Maps Coordinate • 17% increase in operational efficiency of meter fitting team • $39K (£25K) annual savings in administration time for employees on all levels • Improved customer service thanks to more up-to-date information • 58% reduction in Fixed Penalty fines due to improvement in data records

Challenge The company was keen to improve efficiencies in two areas of its business: meter fitting and water network maintenance. The meter fitting team change approximately 400 meters each month, as part of the company’s commitment to replace 24,000 meters for maintenance purposes over a five year period. At the beginning of each month the Network Manager would prepare and print off 600 pages of work orders, which were then sorted by the Works Section Manager into work batches according to rough geographical location. The fitters would visit headquarters each morning to pick up their daily batch and then work out for themselves, using maps and local knowledge, the best order in which to complete their jobs. After each fitting, they filled out a paper form, which they handed in the next day to be checked and then entered into the billing system. The entire process was seen as inefficient and unnecessarily time consuming. The works maintenance crews, responsible for repairing burst water mains, excavating mains and general maintenance, faced a similar scenario. Each job involved a lot of paperwork covering permits, technical information and health and safety, all of which they’d also have to collect each morning from HQ, fill out by hand on the road, and then hand in the next day. For both operations, the dependence on paperwork and manual processes meant that HQ were unable to have an up-to-date picture of which jobs had been finished at any point in time. This meant the Customer Service Team

“We’ve seen tremendous benefits since using Google Maps Coordinate and see huge potential for improving our working practices even further in the future. When you look at all the savings across the board we’ve seen an annual ROI of 500%, which is very impressive.” —Jeremy Heath, Network Manager, Sutton and East Surrey Water plc

couldn’t give customers the most up-to-date information on queries. The business also faced increased notification requirements for any excavations in the road from local councils, which if not accurately completed within the required timescales would result in fixed penalty charges. “We clearly needed to change our business processes, particularly in terms of administration and remote working capabilities for our field staff,” explains Jeremy Heath, Network Manager, Sutton and East Surrey Water. “Many workforce management systems try to do too much and take too long to implement. We wanted a platform that was easy to manage and use and would improve efficiency and provide a demonstrable ROI.” Solution To tackle the challenge, Sutton and East Surrey Water turned to Google Maps Coordinate, a workforce management tool designed to improve communication between businesses and their field staff. Built on Google’s mapping and geolocation infrastructure, Google Maps Coordinate enables employees in the field to be accurately located in real-time. The IT team at Sutton and East Surrey Water wrote the API to allow managers to pull out job data out of the current job control system and plot it straight onto a Google Map that could be viewed by workers on the road via 3G-enabled seven inch tablets. The IT team was also able to customise the fields that the mobile teams needed to capture and collect directly in the app, with this data then being fed back automatically to HQ. “We had no extra money available to introduce a new system, but the money we saved on not having to print out work orders easily covered the cost of Google Maps Coordinate, which pleased the management board,” says Jeremy. “The product was simple to configure from a technical standpoint, and we were able to roll it out within weeks. It took next to no time for our field staff to learn how to use it. As most people had used Google Maps at one time or another, they happily swiped, zoomed in and updated data on the app as soon as I presented them with their tablet.” Benefits The meter fitting team now receive jobs data electronically to their tablet, automatically plotted onto a map. This means no more time-consuming manual sifting through endless pages to work out the most logical job order, and no time wasted for management printing off jobs. Productivity in the field has improved by 17% and the company has been able to dispense with the services of an external contractor who assisted the team as a result.

About Google Maps Coordinate

Google Maps Coordinate is a workforce management tool that improves the efficiency of mobile teams. People are shown on a Google Map, making it easy to assign jobs to the nearest available team member. By getting real-time visibility into where teams are and what jobs they are doing, work can be scheduled in a smarter, more efficient way. For more information visit www.maps.google.com/coordinate

As the customer service team have a clearer picture of where the fitters are and which jobs have been completed, they can provide much swifter, detailed answers to customer queries. The way in which the water network crew operate has similarly improved. Teams log-in via the tablet when they arrive at their location and progress reports are updated in real-time to help Customer Services. Although the company previously received only a low number of fixed penalty charges, the use of Google Maps Coordinate has reduced the number of local council charges by 58% since deployment. Reducing the number of fixed penalty charges is additionally important because it is frequently used as a benchmark by local councils against which they judge utility providers. “Google Maps Coordinate has transformed the productivity and efficiency of our front line staff,” explains Jeremy. “We estimate we’ll save about $24,800 (£16,000) in operational costs in the first year alone. But it’s not just about costs; by giving our employees the tools they need to work,we’re making their jobs easier and more enjoyable.” Google Maps Coordinate has also provided further benefits to the works crew standby teams, who can be called upon at all hours of the day or night to deal with emergencies. With 2,147 miles of water mains to cover, some of the locations they need to reach are so remote they don’t even have a postcode. In the past the team relied on accurate map reading and time was frequently wasted searching for the optimum route to a location. However, with the satellite view provided by Google Maps Coordinate, finding these locations is much easier. Also, when a job is called in, the standby crew go straight to the scene, rather than driving to HQ to collect paperwork, saving $11,600 (£7,500) worth of man hours in travel time annually and further $2,480 (£1,600) savings in fuel. “We’ve seen tremendous benefits since using Google Maps Coordinate and see huge potential for improving our working practices even further in the future,” says Heath. “When you look at all the savings across the board, from fuel to printing to avoiding parking fines we’ve seen an annual ROI of 500%, which is very impressive.”

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